Music That Makes You Dumb

Topic

Virgil Griffith, a CalTech graduate student, follows up books that make you dumb with music that makes you dumb. “Dumb” people listen to Lil’ Wayne and “smart” ones listen to Beethoven, that is, if you believe that SAT is a good judge of smarts. I’m not sure if this is actually new or just became popular again because it was in the WSJ. Virgil put up the book version over a year ago. Oh well, it’s Friday. I’m personally all over the board on this one. What kind of music do you like?

33 Comments

kodisha, I’m perplexed too. Electronica is popular enough by now that it ought to be quantifiable. No Shpongle? Not even an entry for The Orb or Chemical Brothers? If I had been included on that chart I would be in that big blank area behind Beethoven listing, with my thumping sound system. :) Maybe the blank area is where the techno fans would have been?

This music doesn’t make you dumb (or lead to poor standardized test scores), people who have low SAT scores are more likely to listen to this music. There are also some serious socioeconomic issues raised by this graphic (not to mention some value laden thoughts on the SAT). Leave it to the WSJ to make such backwards and specious correlations

Led Zepplin? About the most overplayed band ever. What age group is this? If you track the baby-boom generation, the folks STILL listening are the ones at the I-don’t think-much-about-stuff end of the scale.

Although, the comment about who IS listening to this music makes a point. This popularity contest basically relies on commercial radio stations. And you have to be brain-dead to listen to that for more than 5 minutes in a sitting.

Aside from the obvious problems with his methodology (he’s just correlating average college SAT scores with popularity among students at that college), it’s also a really misleading graphic. The vertical axis means nothing, and the width of the blobs is determined by the standard deviation of that particular musician/genre — which means the more people like that band/genre, the thinner the band you see. So if Country music is most popular at all sorts of colleges, it’ll just show up at a tiny blip in the middle; Beethoven, who is rarely listed, shows up as a big swath (presumably because only Harvard and Princeton students are pretentious enough to list him on Facebook — obviously, real smart people would list Bach instead).

It’s an interesting graphic but really begs a few questions (many already raised by others). I wondered where all the other classical composers, artists are… and then there’s the matter of not only what someone listens to… but how much? I would think a *smart* person would probably have a wider range of musical experience than a *dumber* person…. would be exposed to more and would probably like a variety of musical styles… I don’t think this chart accounts for that variable (one of it’s many failings). I’d be curious if those ranked could only list one musician/style or every one they listen to and if those were ranked from most listened to – to least.

This is the stupidest ******* thing I’ve ever seen. So Jazz fans are “dumb”? In what universe? And apparantly you’re “smart” if you listen to pretentious music that appeals to peaky college students in fake glasses and skinny jeans.